La Douleur

By Marguerite Duras, adapted and directed by Laurence Strangio, the Stork Hotel until May 9

Between them director Laurence Strangio and actor Caroline Lee have won three Green Room Awards, for best actress (2001 and 2002) and most outstanding director (2000), and their collaborative work is now keenly anticipated. This Marguerite Duras piece perfectly suits their style: it is intimate, intense and challenging.

It also combines a characteristic interest in psychology (as in their Portrait of Dora, by Helene Cixous) and the feminist retrieval of historical character (as in Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood).

La Douleur, sometimes translated as The War, is based on a diary written by Duras in 1945, as she waited for her husband's return from Dachau, where he'd been imprisoned as a member of the French Resistance.

The fact that she later had no memory at all of writing it suggests its closeness to a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Its intimacy derives, in part, from the fact that she seems to have no audience in mind. It is an account of unbearable pain, not that of the primary sufferer in this war situation, but the agony of the enforced passivity of the one left behind.

Marguerite has suspended her own life; she can neither sleep nor eat, depending on friends to help her get through the long days. She fantasises the death of her husband (Robert L.) over and over; its confirmation seems the only way her pain will end.

When he returns, later than she could have believed possible, he hovers between life and death for many days. Only when it is clear he will live does Marguerite tell him of a future planned without him, one that would seem unthinkable in light of the experience we have witnessed.

Caroline Lee's performance is compelling and convincing, yet completely unhistrionic. Duras's words are simple, the mundane details of each day only emphasising the unbearable uncertainty of absence, of not knowing what suffering Robert L. has undergone.

The performance is shockingly intimate in its revelations of an emotional state almost beyond words. Yet this tiny fragment of an individual story unobtrusively but powerfully builds a picture of wartime experience that is unique in its perspective. This is war viewed from inside one human heart, in a process that illuminates large-scale horrors visited on millions.

La Douleur is another outstanding collaborative dramatisation from Strangio and Lee.